to be in the prime of his life.
The man was stark naked.
“Oh, God, Clancy, was that snake, Tolliver, right? Were you doing something with those dead people you weren’t supposed to?” She could feel tears gathering in her eyes. There had to be some mistake. Clancy wasn’t like that. He wasn’t.
How well do we know anyone?
The question echoed in her head as she moved back to the next photo and then the one that had been taken before that. When she came to her sixth shot, her stomach had completely turned. What the director had said about Clancy had to be right. He’d been doing improper things with the bodies that were brought into the funeral parlor to be prepared for burial.
She almost stopped, but then, she’d come this far, she might as well see it through.
Natalya’s breath lodged in her throat when she saw the seventh shot. It was of a woman.
Something was wrong here. Clancy was not in to women, he admitted that to her when they were thirteen.
But if he wasn’t into women, why had he taken the photograph? It didn’t make sense.
She needed to see things more clearly than the tiny screen allowed. Camera in hand, she went back to her room and switched on her computer, then waited for it to go through its paces. It moaned and groaned and emitted a battery of strange noises, its lights winking and flashing.
“C’mon, c’mon,” she urged impatiently.
Once the noises and lights had settled down, she slipped the memory card out of the camera and into a slot on her tower. Within a minute, she was pulling up the shot of the nude woman, enlarging it until it filled her entire monitor.
She caught her breath as she saw what Clancy had seen. Quickly, she flipped to the other photos, viewing them one by one.
It was beginning to make sense.
Natalya never bothered shutting off her color printer. It took far too long to come around when she needed it. She hit Print and the machine came out of sleep mode. It was printing within seconds. Slowly, eight by tens of Clancy’s photographs began to emerge from the mouth of the printer. Mike was going to need to see these.
Mike hadn’t known exactly what to make of her phone call when it came. Essentially, Natalya’d said nothing, only that she needed to see him right away. With the scent of her body still fresh in his head, not to mention on his sheets, he could only think that she was returning because she wanted more of the same.
Well, that made two of them, he thought.
He’d begged off from his mother’s weekly Sunday lunch and was glad now that he had. Otherwise, he might have missed Natalya’s call.
Again, it bothered him a little that the moment he’d told her to come over, he caught himself looking forward to her appearance with an anticipation that he wasn’t accustomed to. Now, all that mattered was that she was coming over.
Replaying her last words in his head, he realized that she’d sounded mysterious, but, hell, that was her right. He had to admit, it kind of made things more interesting.
Maybe, he thought, as he went to answer the door, she was having as much trouble reconciling everything that had happened last night as he did. Like where, if anywhere, was this going?
No point in wondering about that until it got to the starting gate, right? It seemed like a solid philosophy. He still went on wondering.
When Mike opened the door, she was wearing a blue sweater beneath a jacket and a pair of jeans that looked as if they’d been applied with a paintbrush. He could feel his temperature rising already.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. Or wrestling emotionally with something, unsure of which side to take.
Damn, he had to stop overanalyzing things.
Mike laughed at himself as he closed the door behind her. He was a cop. Overanalyzing was what he did for a living.
“Elevator out again?” he asked. When she looked at him quizzically, he added, “You seem breathless.”
“No, it’s working,” she assured him, trying to measure out every word. She certainly didn’t want him to think she was panting at the very sight of him—although it would take very little for that to happen. He’d answered the door shirtless.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” he confessed.
The remark stopped her for a second. Was that his way of saying that Saturday night—or was that Sunday morning—had just